How true and lets also not forget all the young people who have now turned 18 and have become eligible to vote. So why is it that Theresa May and her cronies are too frightened or blinkered to admit to the fact that people have changed their minds and do something about it?

Leave was always in the minority. The referendum was between change and staying the same. 37% wanted change, so they went out and voted ‘Leave’. 63% either voted to ‘Remain’ or didn’t bother to vote. In this sort of vote an abstention should be regarded as acceptance of the current situation (otherwise you would have voted for change). In other countries that intend to act on a referendum, there are majority requirements which generally go along the lines of requiring the ‘change’ vote (Leave) to gain more than 50% of the electorate, not just those who turned out to vote. For a 75% turnout, that would have required 67% to vote for Leave which would have been decisive. Higher or lower turnouts would require lower or higher proportions of the vote to succeed. In this case, 37% of the electorate wanted change. Why should a small minority carry 100% of the electorate with it?

Bregret has been proven to be a myth perpetuated by hopeful remainers. Of the people who could be bothered to go vote, 1.4 MILLION people more voted to leave. You can’t lump everyone who didn’t bother voting, in with the remain side. Perhaps I’d they’d have bothered, they’d have voted LEAVE?! If it had been by constituencies in a FPTP, LEAVE would have won by a landslide! The referendum was NOT about staying the same or change. The EU wasn’t every closer union. TOTAL control and a Federal Europe. That’s what people voted against

The referendum resulted from an act of parliament that clearly stated that it was not mandatory on the government. It was an opportunity for the citizens to let parliament know the answer to a leading question that would not be permissible in any court in the world. The public are now saying that the question could not be answered by a simple yes or no answer and that further discussion is required.

Spelling mistakes in original and can’t edit so….
Bregret has been proven to be a myth perpetuated by hopeful remainers.
Of the people that could be bothered to go vote, 1.4 MILIION people more voted to LEAVE.
You can’t lump everyone who couldn’t be bothered voting, in with the remain side.
Perhaps IF they’d have bothered, they’d have voted LEAVE?
If it had been by by constituencies in a FPTP, LEAVE would have won by a landslide!
The referendum wasn’t about staying the same or change.
The EU want ever closer union.
TOTAL control and a Federal Europe.
That’s what people voted against.

Roger Alexander, rubbish.
Is a simple question with a simple answer.
Do you want to remain in or leave the EU.
Were voted to LEAVE.
That means leaving the dingle market as that IS the EU with it’s rules, payments etc.
This was made clear before the referendum by both sides.
Staying in the single market, is staying in the EU.
Membership is NOT the same as having access to.
The whole world has access to the single market. That’s all we need, ACCESS.
Passporting for financial services is nothing to do with the single market

Democracy is accepting that people have the right to change their minds. I am not advocating a second advisory referendum – I am suggesting a first mandatory, legally binding one. This one would allow for the immediate triggering of Article 50 if the vote was still to leave. What are you frighten of Brexiteers? I would accept this result – would you if the vote was to remain?

I’m still don’t quite believe how easy it was was to win people’s vote with lies using tactics straight out of Mein Kampf. It speaks volumes about the lack of sophistication or the average Brit. I find it all very depressing.

Marilyn Hanson,
We already had a fair, democratic referendum.
Leave won.
Cameron said before the referendum, we don’t have never-endums.
You’re not suggesting a ‘first’ legally binding referendum, you’re not accepting the restitution of the first, which the government clearly stated in its propaganda leafelt ‘we will implement the result’
What you want is a second referendum, a second bite of the cherry.
Typical EU tactics, don’t like the result, make them vote again! Haha
LEAVE won and we want OUT now!
The longer remainers try and drag it on, the more uncertainty it causes.
Exactly what remainers claim they DON’T want lol
Anecdotal maybe but I know loads of remain voters that have now seen through the lies of the remain camp and seen the EU for what it really is and would now vote LEAVE and want out!

If you are so convinced that the vote to leave would be upheld in a mandatory referendum, what are you frightened of? It would certainly cost a lot less than all these court cases and appeals and we would have a final, legally binding decision. The country could get on with things – whichever way the vote went.

I’m sorry Anti-EU, but your arguments don’t make any sense. Don’t try and confuse a referendum with a general election. For a start, in a general election there are more than two choices. You’re just worried that if there was another referendum your ‘majority’ would melt away. How can you possibly argue that non-voters would vote Leave? If they had wanted change, they would have made their way to the polling station. That means apathy or acceptance, either way, that doesn’t license domination by a tyrannical minority. On top of that, how about the disenfranchised who were prevented from voting? Ex-pats who have been abroad for 15 years were stopped from voting which is almost unheard of in first world democracies across the world. In most other countries you retain your vote in key elections as long as you retain your citizenship. Even ex-pats who should have had their vote count were prevented from voting by bureaucratic error and mismanagement. It really is quite bizarre that any weight is being given to this referendum outcome at all. We had a ‘fair, democratic referendum’? I must have missed that one. You speak with the same insincerity as Donald Trump.

Read all about it, read all about it …. Arsenal fans now support Tottenham and labour Mps are now tory mps …. oops, that one’s correct! …. oh, and Hillary really won the election in the States and will be signed in by George Soros in a few weeks once america has destroyed the planet

‘Anti-EU Voter’ certainly seems to be having a lot of bites of the cherry in this thread for someone who says you can’t have a second bite of the cherry! 🙂
And yes, you can have a second bite of the cherry. If we had a second referendum we’ll have had a second referendum, simple as that. We won’t have broken any laws of the physical universe.

It’s all a bit of a laugh hey? Cursed to live in interesting times, it’s better than crying over it. Soft or hard, red white or blue, we can be sure some folks will make a profit out of it whilst others, likely those at the bottom, will yet again be losers. Isn’t that the way the world works? Brexit doesn’t just mean Brexit, it means there is yet another excuse to continue squeezing the poor. Don’t we just need to wake up? Can there really be any justification for such systemic disregard for people.

Yeah…that’s not at all how elections work.
Once you voted, you get the effect of your vote. You can’t change the outcome every 2 months because some polls say that the opinion changed.
Imagine doing this with political elections.
We go to vote today and Cameron wins.
Then two months later polls say that now people don’t want Cameron anymore and we vote again. This time, say, Theresa may wins.
Then we vote again a month after because people regret voting theresa may.

That’s not how it works. I’m sorry for bregretters.
Next time think before voting.

Monetsorus:
I don’t know what media you’ve been looking at. All I’m seeing is front page headlines telling us stuff such as that our judges are enemies of the people for deciding Brexit should be subject to Parliamentary scrutiny. The D Mail, Sun, Express continue to be rabidly pro-Brexit.

Steven992.
We don’t have just one General Election and the winners rule for all time. Do we?

A referendum is a different animal and you can’t argue by analogy. We can have two, three, 79 referenda on the trot if we decide to. Or none, which is what you suggest has to be the case.
Referenda usually have a built-in presumption in favour of the status quo, with a threshold for change of 67% or 75% or whatever. We didn’t have this safeguard because Cameron’s Old Etoniansense of entitlement was so stratospherically high he couldn’t conceive that he might lose.
It should never have been a 50% threshold and, if we decided to, I see nothing in principle that says we shouldn’t have an opportunity to rectify hat might well be a very damaging mistake. It’s a question of political will, or, in this case, political pusillanimity.

This referendum was triggered by a statute that passed through parliament and was signed into law by the monarch. It was written down. It was clear that parliament would have to discuss the outcome of the referendum because parliament had discussed all of the statutes that had been enacted in the 40 years since the UK parliament had enacted the first contract on behalf of the citizens of the UK. If there are people who think that we can simply walk away from 40 years of LAWS that we have all had the right to representation through the UK parliament, the EU parliament and all the democratic procedures that have applied to ALL of the citizens of Europe, then they are not living in the real world. It is a similar mentality that says we need a written constitution when we have such a volume of written law that it has proved almost impossible to put on a data base. Some people say that we should rewrite all of this into a single document…… how long would this take and how big would the document be?

I like aspects of the EU, but I like democracy even more. As long as more electors voted for the winning option than didn’t vote, I believe the result ought to be respected. (In any big referendum) If more electors don’t vote than vote for the winning option, I believe the referendum should be done again and again until one of the options is more popular than “not caring either way”.

1.27 million more people voted Leave than Remain, so polls asking 10,000 electors don’t mean much. There should be a second referendum on the final deal before we officially leave, because there was no Brexit plan presented by the Tories before June 23rd.

Not voting should never count as a vote for the status quo. This is because not voting would count as a stronger vote for the status quo than actually voting for it.

Referendums are a once off – the result holds forever even though opinions change. Yet governments have to stand for re-election every five years. They stand for re-election in respect of changing opinions. How then can referendums be democratic?

Mr. Magoo – someone else who doesn’t trust surveys unless everybody is surveyed. That isn’t how surveys work. When they are done properly they can be quite representative and accurate – not 100%, but nobody ever claimed that. Your logic about the referendum being ‘respected’ is nonsense as it was never a situation where we were at point ‘a’ and were choosing between point ‘b’ or ‘c’. It was a case of choosing whether to change, or not. Out of those who had a strong enough opinion to express is one way or another, 51.8% voted to change, but that is only 37% of those who could have made the choice. If there was a strong enough will to embrace change, that would have been 50%+, but it wasn’t. People who didn’t vote, didn’t want change. That is why most democracies have threshold where they are planning on taking action based on referenda. As this is a major economic and constitutional change, shouldn’t we be a bit more sure about what we want before we go down that route?

1. Surveys have been quite accurate in the past, however, I still find it hard to understand how the opinions of a few thousand adults represents that of tens of millions of adults. If surveys were always right: Labour would have won in ’92; Remain would have won the referendum; and Hillary Clinton would have won the US election.

2. If you don’t vote in a referendum (especially one as big and hyped as the one on Europe) it most likely means you don’t care either way, or you can’t make your mind up. Voter thresholds make it incredibly difficult for change to happen; just imagine if it was a referendum on changing the voting system to STV or removing Trident, and we kept the status quo because only 49.5% of the electorate voted for change.

3. There should be a second referendum on whether to accept the final blueprint for post-Brexit UK or to remain in the EU. But if there isn’t, Brexiters shouldn’t cry about it because that’s not what the Conservative government promised.

The Conservative government did promise that the referendum was only advisory and that is why the legal profession are making a fortune deliberating about the appeal relating to Article 50. The promise that the referendum would be considered by parliament is written into the statute that authorized the referendum. If that had not been the case the referendum would have been an instruction to the government to submit our resignation in the form of Article 50 with immediate effect. The fact that Cameron resigned and nobody had a properly documented plan for breaking a 40 old contract between our millions of citizens and the millions of citizens of the EU further proves that the referendum was simply to get the opinion of the public. It was a political ruse to throw the cat among the pigeons and buy a little more time for the status quo.

The government stated clearly in its propaganda leaflet ‘this is your decision’ ‘we will implement what you decide’. Where does that state it was advisory? As the PEOPLE of this country are sovereign and government handed the choice back to the people after a 6/1 vote to do so, it wasn’t merely advisory and gave the government a direct instruction (mandate) what the majority of the people who could be bothered voting wanted them to do. LEAVE the EU.

With respect anti- EU, you need to read up on the referendum rules, and specifically the ones related to the ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the EU one. Everyone, including ALL the politicians, know that it was advisory only – except seemingly you. So, I’m sure, once you have read up, you will agree that we most certainly now need a mandatory referendum.

I come back to my original question – which leaver wants to answer – if, in a mandatory referendum the majority vote is to remain, would you accept that vote?

Why should we have another referendum?
We’ve already had one.
You can’t accept that result so why should we have another?
The government and most of the parties have accepted, there’s a mandate to leave.
If you can’t accept the result of the first, why should I want or accept the result of a second?
Would we them go best of 3? How ridiculous.
I don’t want to be part of a political union NO ONE ever voted to join, that people were lied to about, that it was purely a trade organisation.
A second tier of HIGHER government that the British people can’t get rid of.
If you want to be ruled by the EU, you’re welcome to it, I want OUT and I want out NOW!
I am British, not European.
I like the people of Europe, I despise the EU and everything it stands for.
Before anyone days ‘I fell for the lies…..’
I did my own research ams didn’t like what I found.
I suggest you research your beloved EU and it’s origins/direction and ultimate plan

Tom – If you think we should have another referendum then you should say so plainly. Or do you think fundamental constitutional matters should be decided by a few small scale polls and dubious statistics, as your blogpost suggests? Sitting on the fence just makes you look like a dickhead. Do you have sensible opinions or just a penchant for mindless Daily Mail style rhetoric?

Mr Magoo. It would be wrong to think that in a population of ten million [say] you can’t reasonably accurately extrapolate from a poll of 10,000.
You can see why this is the case if you consider a coin being tossed. The number of possible coin tosses is infinite, so much bigger than a ‘mere’ 10 million. If you tossed a coin 10 times you might well get [say] 7 heads and 3 tails. It would be wrong to conclude that the coin is biased. If you tossed it 10,000 times and got 7000 heads and 3000 tails, on the other hand, the chances that that coin is ‘fair’ is vanishingly small. [5100 heads, 4900 tails on the other hand is perfectly possible for a fair coin.]
In other words, if you look at a 10,000 sample of a population of 10 million people [assuming your sampling is not itself biased, like you only asked people who lived in Chelsea and Kensington or something] then you can get a pretty good idea of the opiinons of the country at large.
(Trust me; I used to be a research scientist who used statistics, and then a Maths teacher! This is basic GCSE stuff].

You can disagree with someone and even, for whatever bizarre reasons, insist that they ought to take a particular view on a matter just because you want them to. But calling an intelligent bloke a dickhead doesn’t come across too well. Might say more about you than him.
Just saying.

Crabramblings, you’re clearly a Maths expert, however, 10,000 is still only 0.1% of 10 million (33,577,342 people voted in the referendum). How would you feel if less than 0.1% of the registered electorate, in your constituency, were allowed to vote in an election?

We were told, there won’t be a second referendum from the start.
We were taken into a common market, with NO consultation of the sovereign people of Britain, by the signature of Ted Heath who them gave the people a referendum in 1975 as an afterthought.
Funnily enough, that referendum was no more/less legally binding than the one we’ve already had, yet the government went with the majority.
We’ve had no chance to get out since. No further referendum, politicians have just taken us further and further into a political union
The majority voted to leave. Get over ithttp://www.vernoncoleman.com/euillegally.html

The law society is rubbing it’s hands in glee at the amount of dosh that is flowing in this meaningless discussion. If Anti-EU does not want to be a member then he can tear up all his personal rights that he has gained by membership and offer his services unscrupulous bosses, at a lower rate than immigrants and start studying to achieve the attributes that gain them entry to our society in the UK… it’s a free world …. but I prefer to live in a world that cooperates with other human beings. I do not want to flood the Chunnel, ground all flights to Europe and try to conquer the empire all over again in order to be a slave to the Westminster toffs.

Roger, that’s just pathetic.
You can co-operate with our European neighbours without having to be tied into a political union with them.
As for rights, the rights you have were fought for by the people of this country and trade unions.
The EU hasn’t given you any rights.

Anti-EU, I am cooperating with my European friends, some of them live next door to me. The good bit is that we are living under common laws that have been democratically agreed over the past 40 years. I am pleased to say that the standardizing regulations that have been democratically negotiated have improved my quality of life and freedom of movement. I am learning from scientific and technical advances that would not be possible without the EU and that is in advance of anything in the world including the USA. My passport is EU approved and if I am unjustly accused in the UK system I have the right to appeal through the European system that has the benefit of the judicial expertise and evolution of laws in all member countries. If it an advantage to belong to a trade union I have 20 times the support than if I was in the UK alone. In the UK we have birthrights and that means rights that we inherit from or parents. This results in each of us having different rights according to the accident of our birth. The human rights that are written into EU legislation are common rights enforceable by laws in which we had a democratic say along with all EU citizens.
It is our rights under the EU laws that is the main reason that the supporters of the Westminster elite want to abolish.
The EU is corrupt and imperfect but it is less so than the city of London and the old school tie elite who regard me and you as plebs who can be forced to behave in any way they want because we all think we are in debt.
Jeremy Corbyn is correct on many issues, one being that we have a better chance of improving the quality of our lives if we are in the club than by standing outside bashing on the door for favours.

How would I feel? Well, I wouldn’t be keen! 🙂
I can see the point you’re making, which is valid but only if we say that only those 10,000 can vote. But I think we are considering them as a sample of the whole population [1/1000th if the population was 10 million] and I’ve explained why we might think that is a reasonable thing to do. [That stuff with the coins]
These 10,000 have expressed their opinion. So we can estimate [with a bit of inaccuracy to be expected but not that much] how the whole electorate might be expected to vote by multiplying the numbers in our sample of 10.000 by 1000.
I think I’ll leave it for you to see if that 1000-times bigger number would be enough to sway the decision.
Where there IS room for doubt is that those 10,000 people might be self-selecting and [for instance] more likely to vote Remain than the average person [or alternatively LESS likely]. So there is an element of doubt there.
My hunch is that a repeat referendum would change the result , but other people’s hunches would disagree.
Only one way to find out who’s right! 😀

Brexit has brought the British Pound to a 31-year low, at a figure which is worse than the value of Pound during the US financial crisis
Now there is speculation that life outside the EU could cost the pound its place in the top tier of reserve currencies. It currently accounts for 5 percent of foreign exchange reserves, according to the IMF. (Taken from Brexit Accelerates the British Pound’s 100 Years of Debasement)
Further, A weaker currency may not do that much to prop up the U.K. economy. While it could boost manufacturing and tourism, three-quarters of the economy is dependent on services such as finance and their future is subject to whatever access to the EU the British government can negotiate. (Also taken from Brexit Accelerates the British Pound’s 100 Years of Debasement)

Bottom line …. people are entitled to call for a referendum any time they feel it can improve their lifestyle…. that’s democracy for you. everyone in the UK has lost 20% of their purchasing power since the referendum we are now a source of cheap labour. Maybe we can sell some more bombs, we are good at that.

Leaving the EU is a great idea – yes right!!! For today’s Independent:

Nearly 40 per cent of US businesses with a base in the UK say they are considering moving elsewhere in the EU because of Brexit, according to a report, warning that the vote to leave could also hit trade relations between Britain and America.

The survey by international law firm Gowling WLG also found that two-thirds of the 533 US firms polled said the UK’s vote to the leave the EU is already impacting investments choices in the country.

Food and beverage, life sciences and financial services firms were most likely to consider relocating whilst aerospace firms were the least likely, the survey has found.

READ MORE

UK-based banks in ‘advanced talks’ over move to Paris due to Brexit

Half of the surveyed firms said that they might bypass the UK to do business directly with the EU.

Still – look on the bright side – Brexit or Cakexit as it is now known has strengthened pro EU support on the continent. Many EU countries are now rubbing their hands together, which bodes well for the 2017 elections.

We are still full members of the EU but will have no say in our exit conditions once Article 50 is triggered. The supreme court will state the legal situation in January but even then it will either be ‘the government’ or ‘parliament’ that will have the power to trigger Article 50. Thank goodness we have Theresa May as prime minister and not Jeremy Corbyn. At least she is prepared to trigger Trident and end the world as we know it to defend us against terrorists, drugs and the impending threat from Russia. We will be free to grow our own bent bananas and swim in polluted seas like we did in the good old days.

“Bottom line …. people are entitled to call for a referendum any time they feel it can improve their lifestyle…. that’s democracy for you. everyone in the UK has lost 20% of their purchasing power since the referendum we are now a source of cheap labour. Maybe we can sell some more bombs, we are good at that.”

Lost 20% of their purchasing power? Complete fear mongering clap trap – typical of the remain campaign. Reading your posts I can see a good home for one of those bombs you want us to sell….. 🙂

As someone who lives in the dark depths of the north-east I have to disagree with this post. Nobody has changed their opinion up here in the land of coal & flat caps. Also all these polls & statistics are extremely biased and flawed in oh so many ways – has Trump & Brexit not taught anybody a lesson about believing the ‘polling experts’? I assume ‘the British people’ you talk about only include students, leftie luvvies, bankers & Tony Blairs lot? You do realise that a vote for Remain is a vote for Blairite principles of power & war… just saying…

I’d love it if this were true, but polls alsosetp show country just as evenly divided as before; one recently I remember 44/43% leave/remain. I suspect people who now “Bregret” cancelled out by people who voted Remsin nevertheless now believe result of that referendum should be respected & therefore now say Leave